Sjarmtrollet wrote: ↑23 October 2023, 09:40
2. BGA has to let all fast-paced turn-based games follow sleeping hours. Can be fixed.
This is not about fast-paced turn-based games. This is about tournament play. Tournament play is fixed time limit. You can establish playing hours, as per turn-based games, which does mean the clock only ticks for 12 hours in 24. However, this means your playing pool is limited and for less popular games, it can be hard enough to get a tournament off the ground as it is. So a lot of tournaments are set to 24-hour playing times. But this means if your turn happens to roll around during your sleeping hours, you can find yourself at a serious disadvantage. And that's pure luck, based on who else happens to be at your table, and where the timezone of the player before you happens to be. People in all timezones have found themselves disadvantaged and/or booted from tables where they were actively playing and would have finished the game within the tournament maximum time - frequently, games get to the last few turns and a losing player will boot an out of time player because if you happen to have an older account than at least one other player at the table, you will progress and they will not.
Also, as it happens, fast-paced turn-based games DO have to set sleeping hours. So that's not an issue at all, actually, regardless of it also not being the issue here.
Sjarmtrollet wrote: ↑23 October 2023, 09:40
3. OR BGA has to let players limit who can join based on time-zone. Can be instated.
People currently make this choice for themselves. While BGA probably could setup a thing where you can't join if your timezone is outside certain times, I suspect this would just result in people monkeying with their timezone to join whatever tournaments they want. Additionally, not everyone plays the same way. I suspect some people are more active during their night, so trying to police what games they can join based on what the majority think appropriate playing hours are may be frustrating for them.
The problem is several fold:
1. Tournament creators need more flexibility in creating their tournaments. This could include longer time limits or turn-based time limits, instead of only fixed (both are generally workable, the first is probably slightly better for tournaments where timing of rounds can be important).
2. Playing hours could be made more workable if they respected different timezones - that is, playing hours are between 10am-10pm in YOUR timezone, not in the timezone of the tournament creator. So I can take my turn during the day, and it flips to a player on the other side of the world where it's currently 4am. Their clock won't start ticking again til 6am. This unfortunately is not as easy as it sounds to develop (which is probably why it hasn't been).
3. Booting in tournaments needs to be improved. Either booting needs to be an "everyone at the table vote", or booting needs to be able to be disabled for tournaments (tournament games have a maximum time related to the selected time limit, so the tables won't run forever if someone AWOLs).
4. The ways of awarding placements when a tournament game does not complete needs to be improved. Currently it's based on most time remaining (if the game is allowed to time out), or seniority of account (if someone is booted). Neither of these is any particular indication of who might be more deserving of the win. Time might mean something if the playing hours respected individual timezones. But this one is tricky, as there isn't an easy way to know who is winning at a given point in many games, due to non-linear scoring conditions (which is probably how most games work).
And there may be more issues. Creating a good tournament system isn't easy and this one certainly isn't perfect. Unfortunately, it also seems to be not under any kind of active development either.
There is no reason for it to exist in tournaments, when the length of the game is hard-limited by the tournament anyway.